Prof. Tania Avgustinova
Computational Linguistics
Prof. Roland Marti
Slavic Studies
Prof. Dietrich Klakow
Statistical NLP
Prof. Bernd Möbius
Phonetics
Mutual intelligibility and surprisal in Slavic
intercomprehension
SFB
1102 (C4) | Web
experiments
| Project
wiki
The project INCOMSLAV investigates the relation between information density, encoding density and grammaticalisation in a cross-linguistic perspective, focusing on intercomprehension within the family of Slavic languages. In the initial funding period (2014-2018), the project brings together results from the analysis of parallel corpora and from a variety of experiments with native speakers of Slavic languages and compares them with insights of comparative historical linguistics on the relationship between Slavic languages. A statistical language model of surprisal is used to measure information density and as a tool to gauge how language users master high degrees of surprisal, due to partial incomprehensibility. The key idea here is that comprehension of an unknown, but related, language should be better, when the language model adapted for understanding the unknown language exhibits relatively low average surprisal, or density. In the second funding period (2018-2022), the research agenda is extended to spoken language, which allows us to investigate how information density is balanced between the acoustic and the text level in successful intercomprehension. At all levels from the acoustic signal and its phonetic structure to the texts generated from speech we develop similarity metrics and information density measures related to Slavic intercomprehension.
PhD research staff (phase 1): Andrea Fischer, Klára Jágrová, Irina Stenger
PhD research staff
(phase 2): Yu
Tracy Chen, Badr
Abdullah , Jacek
Kudera
Resources
| Release | INCOMSLAV materials | Status | Outdated |
| 13.05.2016 | Video: e-presentation by Klára Jágrová | public | |
| 15.03.2017 | Lexical ressource: top 100 nouns of BG, CS, PL, RU | request access | 2016-09-16; 2017-02-17 |
| 07.06.2017 | Database for entropy and adaptation surprisal calculations (word pair lists BG-RU and PL-CS) | request access | |
| 07.06.2017 | Computer code (scripts) | public | |
| 23.05.2019 |
Polish NP stimuli with
distance and surprisal values |
public |
|
| 23.05.2019 |
Highly predictive
contexts (PL
sentences) |
public |
Publications
2019
Jágrová, Avgustinova: Intelligibility of highly predictable Polish target words in sentences presented to Czech readers. CICLing 2019. Preprint.Stenger, Avgustinova, Belousov, Baranov, Erofeeva. 2019. Interaction of linguistic and socio-cognitive factors in receptive multilingualism [Vzaimodejstvie lingvističeskich i sociokognitivnych parametrov pri receptivnom mul’tilingvisme], 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies (Dialogue 2019), Proceedings, Moscow, Russia: http://www.dialog-21.ru/digest/2019/online/.
2018
Jágrová: Processing effort of Polish
NPs for Czech readers
– A+N vs. N+A.In:
Guz, Szymanek (eds.): Canonical
and Non-Canonical Structures in Polish. Studies in
Linguistics and Methodology vol. 12. Wydawnictwo KUL,
pp. 123-143. Preprint
Jágrová, Avgustinova, Stenger, Fischer: Language
models, surprisal and fantasy in Slavic
intercomprehension, Computer Speech & Language,
Available online 12 June 2018, ISSN 0885-2308,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2018.04.005.
2017
Stenger, Jágrová, Fischer, Avgustinova, Klakow, & Marti. (2017). Modeling the impact of orthographic coding on Czech–Polish and Bulgarian–Russian reading intercomprehension. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 40(2), 175-199. doi:10.1017/S0332586517000130
Jágrová, Stenger, Marti,
Avgustinova. (2017). Lexical and Orthographic Distances
between Czech, Polish, Russian, and Bulgarian - a
Comparative Analysis of the Most Frequent Nouns. In:
Language Use and Linguistic
Structure. Olomouc Modern Language Series, Palacký
University Olomouc. pp. 401-416 (online)
2016
Jágrová, Stenger, Avgustinova, Marti: Polski to język nieskomplikowany? Theoretische und praktische Interkomprehension der 100 häufigsten polnischen Substantive. In: Federalny Związek Nauczycieli Języka Polskiego (ed.). Polski w Niemczech - Polnisch in Deutschland 4(2016). pp. 5-19Fischer, Jágrová, Stenger, Avgustinova, Klakow, Marti. (2016). Orthographic and Morphological Correspondences between Related Slavic Languages as a Base for Modeling of Mutual Intelligibility. In: Calzolari, Choukri, Declerck, Goggi, Grobelnik, Maegaard, Mariani, Mazo, Moreno, Odijk, Piperidis.(eds.) Language Resources and Evaluation Conference LREC 2016, pp. 4202-4209, included linguistic resources, Portorož (Slovenia)
Stenger. (2016) How Reading Intercomprehension Works among Slavic Languages with Cyrillic Script. In: Köllner,. Ziai (eds.): Proceedings of the ESSLLI 2016 Student Session: pp. 30-42
2015
Fischer, Jágrová, Stenger, Avgustinova, Klakow, Marti.
(2015). An Orthography Transformation Experiment with
Czech-Polish and Bulgarian-Russian Parallel Word Sets. In:
Sharp, Lubaszewski, Delmonte (eds.) Natural
Language Processing and Cognitive Science 2015 Proceedings.
Ca Foscarina Editrice, Venezia. Fischer, Jágrová, Stenger, Avgustinova, Klakow, Marti (2015) Orthography in Language Modelling of Mutual Intelligibility. REMU International Conference on Receptive Multilingualism, University of Eastern Finland. (poster)
Avgustinova, Fischer, Jágrová, Klakow, Marti, Stenger (2015) The Empirical Basis of Slavic Intercomprehension. REMU International Conference on Receptive Multilingualism, University of Eastern Finland. (slides)
2014
Klakow, Avgustinova, Stenger, Fischer, Jágrová: The
INCOMSLAV project. Seminar
in formal linguistics at Charles University, Prague.
November 24, 2014. Video recording, abstract &
presentation: http://lectures.ms.mff.cuni.cz/view.php?rec=238
